Evo Hosting, www.evohosting.co.uk

I recently had a need to contact Evo to ask for some help. They had hosted my son's website for a few years, but his new website had been created by a developer who had an allegiance with another hosting company.

He would have preferred to stay with Evo as he had enjoyed a trouble free experience for some 4 years, but the decision was taken out of his hands.

He was trying to extract some data from the old site and Evo was his last hope. Instead of saying that they could not help, they pulled out all the stops and eventually recreated a temporary site from their archives so that he could access the website and retrieve the important information. I could not believe how helpful they were especially as they were dealing with an ex customer.

They seem to have received some adverse comments on this site, but if our experience is anything to go buy , they have certainly turned the corner. I cannot comment on the quality of their hosting, but would reiterate that my son never had any problems at all. Re the customer service and effort, they are second to none, and I would recommend them to anybody.

My son has already stated that if his new hosting outfit do not cut the mustard, he will insist on returning to Evo. They deserve to succeed.

Since the sale of the company my sites are constantly down. It used to be a good company as their support is very helpful. That doesn't help when the servers are constantly going down though.

Sometimes I get 30 drop off's a day. Time to move

We've had a business account with Evo for the past five years; they host a couple of our larger domains which receive around 1M visits per month and we have until recently been very happy with their service and technical support.

However, in August 2014 Evo were taken over by their parent company Daily.co.uk and ever since then things have started going downhill. Feature-wise Evo have pretty much everything you would expect from a modern hosting company and I have no complaints about being able to access or customise our server via cPanel which has always been perfectly adequate for our needs. My main concern is the handling of problems and the complete lack of communication from Technical Support when an issue is raised via their ticketing system. Since tech support is such an important part of the hosting service, I want to share my recent experiences here with others to warn potential customers about ordering with Evo in case they require technical support which is practically non-existent.

Used to be good but service has declined dramatically in recent times

Firstly a word on how their 24/7 technical support system operates. You submit a ticket which is designated "Level 1 Support" and is fielded, based on the customer service names, to somewhere in Eastern Europe. L1 support can handle the most simple of requests, but if there is anything remotely challenging or non-standard you will have to be referred to Level 2 Support who also appear to be located overseas and have limited abilities. On a couple of occasions I have been told by L1 support that my problem is "a custom coding issue" that is "out of their scope", only to have it fixed by L2 support who suddenly realise it is part of their remit after I have complained. If your problem cannot be fixed by L2 support it will be passed up the chain again: L3 and L4 are based in the UK and are more technically capable but from what I can gather they are a very small team (a few people at most) that do not operate on a 24/7 basis which means if you have an urgent problem that cannot be fixed by L1 or L2 support you may be waiting for a day or so before anyone even acknowledges you. After L4 comes 'Management' which provide the same support at L4 but is viewed by the Operations Director. At the time of writing I have been waiting for four days for L4 support to answer one of my tickets and 6 days for management to reply to another. These are not trivial matters - one concerns a misconfiguring of our site caused by their recent server upgrades and they are flatly refusing to reply to me now. When I asked for an email address to complain, I was given a (wrong) email address ending in .daily.co.uk by L4 support who have stopped replying to me since.

After a recent (compulsory) server upgrade our main domain suddenly stopped using SSL and we lost nearly a weeks' worth of orders only to be told our SSL certificates were not copied over problem from the old server. If that wasn't bad enough, we then started experiencing severe performance issues on our new server which caused our domains to timeout and traffic dropped by 90%. The worst part of this is I spent nearly a week back-and-forth to customer services who acknowledged there was a problem affecting "a small minority" of their customers, but sometimes took 24-36 hours to reply to me even though our main site was unusable. Eventually when I threatened legal action for compensation our server miraculously started performing fine again with no explanation or apology from Evo. During the downtime we were forced to buy hosting with another third party just to get our data feeds up and running again so we are effectively paying twice for Evo's incompetence. A week after this happened we noticed our custom 404/error pages were not redirecting at all. L1 support told me it was a .htaccess issue that was out of their remit. When I reminded them I hadn't changed anything in .htaccess and things were working fine before their 'upgrade', L2 support then told me the error pages hadn't been copied over to the new server properly (familiar story) and he was passing it on to L4. Before he did so he commented out a line on our .htaccess file which redirected all of our traffic from every domain we use onto our main websites homepage! I asked him to urgently undo his last change, which he did, then passed the ticket up to L4. The issue has been sat with L4 support for over a week now and I have gone for four days without a reply. I don't know what else to do. I have tried contacting them on Twitter and emailing their parent company but I have been given the cold shoulder and I feel like they are completely neglecting me as a customer.

Beware of the problems I've faced here and take heed if you are considering order with Evo - their technical support is unreliable and shoddy, and if your website ever faces technical problems (even if Evo have caused it themselves) they will let you down right when you need them the most. Look elsewhere and save yourself the inconvenience. We now to go through the trouble of transferring everything over to a new provider but I can't help but feel like I'm leaving a sinking ship.

Eco hosting used to be a great company but recent changes have caused support levels to drop significantly. After a supposed hardware upgrade we were left without a working website for over a week and no timeframes from Evo hosting on when it would be fixed.

From a company part of a PLC (daily.co.uk) you would, and should expect a lot better. Hopefully they will sort out their problems before things get worse and they lose more customers

I have been using Evohosting for several years now and with multiple accounts.

The standard of service has been consistently excellent. Especially prompt response to support requests.

I have confidently recommended their service to numerous clients.

I have been with EvoHosting for a good while now, hosting all of my own adn my client's websites and have had no problem with them, in fact they are actually an amazingly great hsoting company when it comes to service and support and I would normally recommend them to everyone.

However, in the past week, one of their customer service advisors, Adam, admittedly gave out sensitive personal/financial information of my account to one of my clients, against UK Data Protection legislation.

They had no right, authorisation or legal basis in which to do so and as such this type of activity could have a huge impact on any small business. Their handling of the affair when challenged was poor to say the least, dismissing teh seriousness of the incident and altogether not replying to my last contact with them.

Although I continue to host with them for the time-being, as their service is good. I would advise caution when it comes to trusting them with sensitive data.

Evo Hosting is the second hosting company we have used, and have done so for quite a few years, with no plan to leave them.

We went to Evo Hosting as the last hosting company... one of UK's big ones were poor on support and generally not bothered. We decided to move to them after reading reviews and researching as much as we can, and simply they are better than what the reviews say in our eyes. Our company has three high volume websites, with another about to go live, and we have never (touch wood), had any technical problems with traffic, or anything else to be honest. When we have had niggles as such, they are because we have wanted to do something technical from the server side, but wasn't sure how to do it. Each time they have come back with a solution and in some cases, a real person has taken the time to email a step by step guide how to do what we need, which is some cases they didn't have to go as far as they did, but did anyway. The service is by email support and the response time has been about 10-20 mins, and even if it cannot be sorted by that person contacting us, they tell us so and explain that it is being passed onto another department that sorts it for us. I cannot think of many companies who offer this level of support, except ours of course, and I hope when they grow bigger and bigger, they keep the same level of service as this will keep companies like ours recommending them, and staying with them.

I have been with Evohosting for a few years and feel ashamed that I have not sent a review before now. Any minor problems or queries that we have had during the time with them have been resolved efficiently and quickly. It is great to deal with someone that you actually feel wants to help you and that you are not a hindrance.

Emailed them on a Saturday morning with a minor query even though I knew support on that query was only available Monday -Friday. Guess what? They replied and sorted my query. How is that for service?

What drew me to Evo Hosting was a friend's website which loads ridiculously fast. I know the effort it takes to get sites to load that fast on a well-specced and tuned VPS. Evo sites are just as fast.

I recently opened an account and moved all of my Wordpress sites there. I raised bunch of tickets all of which were answered quickly and effectively, so the lack of phone support is not an issue.

One of my sites is currently a DDOS (denial of service attack) with a million requests every 24 hours. The advisor in support said it would be fine to move it to Evo. Initially there was a bit a problem (though the site continued to load fast). I raised a ticket and he mitigated the attack effectively.

On shared hosting this level of support and this quality of service is out of the ordinary. Highly recommended.

After doing a miguided upgrade of Wordpress my website was FUBAR. The guys at Evo sorted it out in double-quick time for me - I doubt any of our subscribers noticed any downtime. I'll be more carefull next time.

Evo Hosting are to be Highly Recommended.